Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

“Who’s Karen?” I said groggily, and Cassie was silent for a moment.

  “Our mother,” she said. Outside the window, some branches were moving in the darkness when I looked out. I noticed how the spaces between boughs cut the sky into shapes.

  “Don’t you ever feel sorry for Karen?” she asked me. “I mean just a little?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never really thought about it.”

  To be honest, until Cassie started calling, there were a lot of things that I hadn’t thought much about. I knew the basic facts, of course. I knew, for example, that my mother was thirty-two years old when she was sent to prison. She had given birth by that time to eight children. They were:

  Cassie

  Cecilia Joy

  Ashlee

  Piper

  Jordan

  Me

  LaChandra

  and Nicholas

  We all had different dads. All of us were living with her when LaChandra and Nicholas were killed. Then our mother’s parental rights were terminated, of course, and we all went to different foster homes, and she was sentenced to life without parole.

  So we had been sent on various separate paths away from her, and from one another. I guess I had always assumed that this was for the best, but Cassie didn’t see things that way. She told me that she had been gathering information for years, tracking each of us down, one by one. She was the oldest—she was almost fifteen when our mother got sent away—and she said she’d always felt like it was her responsibility to keep an eye on all of us. “They can tear us apart, but they can’t make us stop loving one another,” she had told me the first time she called, and I soon came to recognize this phrase as one of her mottoes. “Only connect, Robbie,” she said to me from time to time. “That’s what I firmly believe. Only connect.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, though to be honest I wasn’t totally sure what she was talking about. I guess what she meant was that we were all still connected, even though we were scattered, even though so much time had passed. I guess it was a legitimate way to feel about things.

  According to Cassie, most of us had done very well for ourselves, despite our rough beginnings. Cecilia Joy, for example, lived with her husband and two beautiful children on a sheep ranch in Montana and she’d had some of her poems published. Ashlee was taking acting classes while working as a receptionist for a movie studio in Los Angeles, and Piper had taken her first job as a mechanical engineer for a company in Houston. Jordan had come out of her coma, recovered completely, and now was attending medical school at Princeton University.

  Sometimes, I have to admit, I wasn’t completely sure I believed everything Cassie told me. It seemed like she might be exaggerating certain things, maybe stretching the truth a bit. She claimed, for example, that her ex-husband was a rich construction contractor with mob connections, which was why she was always changing her cellphone number. She said that she had spent some time in law school, and that she was a certified public accountant, though now she worked as a home caregiver for the elderly in St. Augustine, Florida. Sometimes she would call and I’d think I could hear the background noise of what sounded like a bar or a party.

  Once, I thought I could hear the boxy voice of some kind of official announcement being made in the distance—maybe the last call at an airport terminal: All ticketed passengers must be on board.

  “Cassie,” I said, “Where are you right now? What are you doing?” And she made a shrugging sound in her throat.

  “I’m at home,” she said innocently, though I could’ve sworn that I very clearly heard the murmur of people in the background, and a baby crying.

  “I’m just sitting here at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea,” she said thoughtfully. “Just sitting here looking out at the moon shining over the ocean.”

  My own life wasn’t as interesting as the stories that Cassie told about herself and our siblings. Perhaps that was the problem; perhaps that was why I didn’t always quite believe her. My foster parents, the Dowtys, were simple, kindly, middle-of-the-road people: a math teacher and his wife. I grew up with them in Cleveland, Ohio, and then I remained there afterward, mostly of my own free will, with one year of college to my credit and four years working as a housepainter for my foster cousin Rob Higgins. I lived in a little converted apartment above my foster mom’s garage, and I paid her a hundred dollars a month for rent. I was twenty-five years old, and I’d visited only three other states, and zero foreign countries. These were the bare numbers of my life, which I kept in my head. I had 7,891 dollars saved up in the bank. I had ten toes and nine fingers. I got up at six in the morning six days a week. Sometimes I worried, wondering what Cassie was telling the other siblings about me, because there was so little interesting to say.

  It was funny, I suppose, that Cassie and the others had so quickly come to occupy such a large part of my daily thoughts. The truth was, I’d hardly considered them at all in those long years since I’d last set eyes on them. They had almost completely faded out of my mind before that one day when Cassie called me for the first time.

  “Happy birthday, Robert!” Cassie had said. Those were the first words out of her mouth when I answered the phone. “You’ll never guess who this is!” she said.

  It was actually the day after my birthday, and I was still a little hungover. I was sitting in my recliner, watching TV, and I put the sound on mute with my remote. I sat there blankly for a bit.

  “This is your sister Cassie,” she said at last. “You probably don’t even remember me, do you?”

  I hesitated. What does a person say to a question like that? I thought I could feel a kind of glimmer of recognition, though I wasn’t sure if it would officially be considered “remembering.” For some reason, I pictured her with red hair and freckles, and I thought hard about it until I pulled up a momentary flash of recollection. Here was the kindly policeman who carried me on his shoulders; here were the tops of the heads of my siblings below me; here was the weeping voice of my mother, who was locked in the bathroom with the water running. My babies! my mother was crying. Come help Mommy! Come save Mommy! And from my perch on the kindly policeman’s shoulders I could see more policemen coming with crowbars, and a shiny puddle of water was emerging from under the crack of the door.

  I sat there silently for a moment, considering this memory. Then I slid it slowly to the back of my mind again, and shifted the phone from one side of my face to the other.

  “Cassie,” I said. “Sure I remember you.”

  • • •

  I opened my eyes.

  The electricity had been off the night before, another power outage, but now it was back on. The bedside lamp bent brightly over me. The digital clock was blinking, the television over in the corner had come on and was sending a mist of static into the room. I noticed that there were some hard objects in the bed, and when I felt underneath me I discovered my flashlight and the cordless phone, and I sat up. It was morning, basically. Late August.

  The night before, I’d fallen asleep while still talking to Cassie, and little scraps of our conversation floated back into my head. Tell me, she’d said. What’s the first thing—

  “—the first thing you remember,” she said.

  “I’m thinking,” I said, and she let out a breath.

  “Don’t blow a gasket,” she said. “Geez. It’s not such a difficult question.”

  “Well,” I said. I considered again: nothing.

  “Okay,” she said. “So just tell me about Cleveland—how about that? Tell me about the first time you came to your new—”

  Your new family, she said, and I shifted.

  “Um,” I said. I considered. I tried to think of interesting anecdotes.

  I was so boring, I thought.

  I had become aware of it, more and more, as the summer wore on, as the first rush of enthusiasm and excitement began to grow cooler. I thought of Cassie a lot while I was at work. What kinds of things could I tell her next time we talked? What would I say
? I tried to save up little jokes I’d heard, articles from the newspaper. I moved through the days watchfully, waiting for a quirky little moment I could package up for Cassie.

  I arrived in Cleveland the summer I turned twelve. A social worker put me on the train in St. Louis. I guess things had been explained to me in some fashion or another and I was aware that my new foster parents were going to meet me when I got to my destination. I was given some papers to carry with me and someone had packed me a lunch in a paper bag, a juice box and some baby carrots and a peanut butter sandwich.

  It must have been around 2 a.m. when we got in. I remember, at least, that it was the wee hours of the morning, though I don’t know why I would have come in at such a time. I remember only that the conductor came to the seat where I was sleeping and ran the beam of his flashlight gently across my face. “This is your stop coming up, young man,” he whispered. The social worker had spoken with him when I was being put on the train, so he must have known some part of my story. He looked down as if he knew some terrible secret about me, stern and sorrowful the way old workingmen get in the years before they retire, and he stood there waiting to be sure I was awake before he moved on down the aisle. There was the faintly dusty smell of the old air-conditioning and the hiss of the pneumatic door opening between the train cars. Beyond the window was dark but you could hear it raining.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dowty were there on the platform when the train stopped. Water was trickling down from the awning that led toward the station building and passengers were opening up their umbrellas as they got off the train. I stepped down the metal stairs with my old alligator-skin suitcase and that was when I saw Mrs. Dowty looking right at me. She was a skinny little woman in a blue navy pea coat, and I saw that her eyes had rested on me—hopefully, though also a little concerned, I thought. She had a little sign that she had made on which she had printed my name. ROBERT POTTER, it said. WELCOME HOME.

  Mr. Dowty had been standing there holding her hand, and when he saw me coming forward he untwined his fingers from hers and came forward, smiling. He was a short man, only a little taller than Mrs. Dowty was, with a bald head and square black glasses.

  “Robert?” he said to me. “Robert?” And I was surprised to see that his hands and fingers had a lot of dark hair growing on them, despite his baldness.

  “How do you do?” he said, and we shook hands.

  “Let me take that for you!” he said, and he slipped the handle of my suitcase out of my grasp.

  “Did you have a good trip?” he said. “It’s awfully early in the morning for a boy to have to get up and around!”

  I nodded and followed along beside him. All during this time Mrs. Dowty had continued to stand there holding her sign, the two of us watching each other as I approached, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. I thought maybe she had been expecting something else, a different type of boy altogether, and there were butterflies in my stomach.

  She had her hand up holding the throat of her coat closed and there was a gust of wind off the lake.

  “Anna,” Mr. Dowty said, “I believe this is our boy,” and she stood there for a minute longer.

  “Yes,” she said.

  We drove home through the silent, faded city and I sat in the backseat with my head pressed against the window. Did we talk? I don’t remember that we said anything—Mr. Dowty driving, Mrs. Dowty next to him in the passenger seat, planes of light tilting and passing across our faces. I saw some men sleeping on steaming grates on a sidewalk, and blank brick fronts of empty warehouses. The halogen streetlights bent their heads over us, the traffic lights hanging like lanterns from braided black wires. No one else seemed to be awake, and we passed under a cement train bridge and curved up a hill lined with dark trees, houses and apartment buildings hidden between the branches. I closed my eyes and opened them, and then we were pulling into a driveway and here was the house where I would be living from now on.

  I don’t remember what I was feeling at the time. I could never very clearly recall the foster home where I was living before I came to the Dowtys’, and perhaps even then I had almost forgotten it. I thought of myself as an object, a box, and my mind was clenched in the center of it and muffled under layers of packing, in hibernation, and I imagine that I must have moved mechanically when Mr. Dowty opened the door of the car, holding my suitcase in his hand, speaking in a voice so soft that it seemed to be only inside my head. Come on, now, Robert, let’s go to sleep in a nice soft bed, come on now, and I followed him through the backyard gate and through the doorway and up the stairs to where a room had been prepared for me.

  It was a small, neat room on the corner of the second floor, and even at that hour, sleepy and dazed as I was, I was aware of the room as a kind of empty space, a place that hadn’t been lived in for some time. The carpet had been freshly vacuumed—you could see the lines where the vacuum had brought the shag of the blue carpet up into tufts, like artificial grass. The bed was tightly made, the pillow folded under the bedspread and tucked like a package, a quilt folded over the foot. There was a little desk with a lamp on it and a blotter with a single pencil in the center, and above the desk was a bookshelf with the books arranged, it seemed, from shortest to tallest, the spines all even with one another in a single, smooth wall, as if they were bricks. Mrs. Dowty went in ahead of me with the polite, careful steps of a nurse, which she was, and I stood in the doorway as she went to the dresser along the wall and opened the top drawer, displaying its dustless vacancy as if she were showing me a cabinet of knickknacks that mustn’t be touched.

  “You can put your clothes in here,” she said. “But you don’t need to do that tonight. I imagine you’re very tired and want to go right to sleep.”

  “Yes,” I said. I looked down at my shoes, a pair of ragged, cracked high-tops with laces the gray color of dishwater, and I felt lonely and ashamed.

  Later I would learn that this had been the room of the Dowtys’ son, Douglas, who had been dead three years by the time I came. Douglas had been sixteen, had died in a diving accident, Mrs. Dowty said; he broke his neck on the cement bottom of the town swimming pool, and by the time he was pulled out of the water his brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long.

  “We were able to donate some of his tissue. His bones,” she said. “Corneas …” She considered, and I assumed that there was a long list of things that she had memorized, items that recited on in her mind, though she was silent. “So,” she said, after a pause. “So. I like to think that not only does his spirit live on in our hearts, but his physical body lives on to some extent as well.”

  I had been there for months when she told me this; we were sitting at the kitchen table and Mr. Dowty had already gone off to work at the high school, but I was staying home with the flu. It was winter and outside it was all snowy white and shoveled pathways along the sidewalks.

  I was glad that I didn’t know, that first night, that I was going to be sleeping in the room of a dead boy. Still, I suppose that in some ways I did know, as I unbuttoned my shirt and unlaced my shoes and took off my jeans. There was a kind of steady, weighted stillness in the room as I folded my clothes as best I could and put them into a pile. I got into the bed, in between the cool, dry sheets, and put my head against the thick pillow and folded my hands over my chest as if I were in a coffin. After a moment my eyes closed without my noticing.

  When I woke up the next morning, it had been daylight for a while. It was a day in April and for a moment I expected to still be on the train. I could not remember where I was, I didn’t recognize the room, and I felt that blank, open space in my mind, which is what it must be like to have amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease, that sense of grasping, a foot coming down and not finding the ground. I sat up, and I could just barely hear them talking in some other part of the house and my brain pulled out a little flash: the Dowtys standing on the train platform in the rain, in the night, two silhouettes under umbrellas, but it might as well have been an old black-and-white m
ovie I had seen a long time ago on a television in the recreation room of the group home, a memory light as a piece of ash.

  I was aware again of the room I was in, that silent feeling of disapproval, and I could see Douglas’s collection of books looking down at me from their shelf. Field Guide to Insects of North America. The Observer’s Sky Atlas. From Atoms to Infinity. Half Magic—

  I was moving my eyes along the shelf, reading each title, and I heard a young man’s voice say, very distinctly: You mean he’s sleeping in there right now? In Douglas’s room?! Or so I imagined. I pulled back the covers and slipped on the same jeans and T-shirt that I had worn when I left St. Louis.

  I didn’t want to stay in bed while they were awake—thinking I was a lazybones. And although I wanted to take a shower I didn’t want to be naked in the house with all of them out there, talking about me. And so I found my way down the stairs, following their voices, and around the corner from the foot of the staircase I could see the yellow wallpaper of the kitchen and a young man, a teenager, sitting at the kitchen table. I could see through the doorway his tennis shoe and the ham of his calf and his hand reaching down to scratch the sock on his ankle. This, I would learn later, was Rob Higgins.

  • • •

  Rob Higgins was eighteen years old that year. Only six years older than me—though the distance between twelve and eighteen is very far, maybe the longest six years we ever travel. Spying on him from around the corner, I guessed that he was in high school. He looked like one of the boys that went to the Catholic high school near the group home back in St. Louis, a certain kind of face that I associated with bullies. Reddish hair under a baseball cap. Freckles. Small, upturned nose. A sort of wiry quarterback build. I thought of the names that such boys would call after us as we hurried back from our school to the blocky, narrow-windowed cluster of buildings where we were kept. “Retards!” they called. “Faggots! Niggers!” And though these words didn’t even apply to us, they were still scary—they had a blunt force, the ugliest, dirtiest names that these dull-witted high school boys could think of. That was what we were to them.